I got an email from Virgin Media, my ISP, the other day about their cloud like online storage, where they give you 10 gig.

I downloaded the client software onto my Vista PC and had a go at backing up a few files, and it did appear to work, though the upload speed was very slow. Nevertheless it was free and I liked the idea of backing up all my documents to a site that will probably be around for the forseeable future. I also downloaded the client software to my XP PC and got that backing up my documents to its own folder on the ‘network’ drive. Again it was slow. Just to push it a bit I got the Vista PC backing all of my documents on that PC up to it’s own folder on the ‘network’ drive as well at the same time.

You have the option of selecting folders or individual files, and the folder with the documents in is ‘My Documents’ on XP and ‘Documents’ on Vista. The trouble with this is the ‘Documents’ folder on Vista includes my VMware virtual drive image files, which are huge and which I don’t really need to backup.

After a while I noticed that the Vista PC was uploading about 10 times slower than the XP PC, so I stopped the XP backup to see if it was just a bandwidth issue. It wasn’t, the Vista PC was still crawling up a hill. I stopped the Vista PC backing up and had a look at the server to see what was there, and there wasn’t much. Hmmm…

I started looking at other backup services and there was one called humyo (Not a capital in site. Ed). This service was web based so there was no untested client software to install. I set both PC’s to backup and fired them off and they appeared to work OK, well they thrashed about to their hearts content for a while.

Sometime the following day I rebooted the XP PC with no problems but later when I rebooted the Vista PC it wouldn’t start. No kidding, just got a blank screen. Don’t panic (Why not, sounds like a good idea to me. Ed). I rebooted in Safe Mode, which worked OK and spent ages trying to figure out what I had changed on the PC in the last couple of days. Of course I had installed the Virgin backup client. I uninstalled that and restarted the PC and it booted up OK. Of course it wasn’t quite that quick as before uninstalling the backup client, I had fiddled about with restores quite a bit, to no avail.

Though the Vista PC now booted and worked OK what I inexplicably lost along the way were my display adapter settings. They were, prior to Vista not starting, at a resolution of 1680 x 1050 which looked pin sharp, then they got stuck at 1280 x 1024 and text looked blurred. I could increase the resolution but it still didn’t look as good as before and if I went higher than 1680 x 1050 then the Samsung monitor displayed a message slap bang in the middle of the screen saying that it should be set to 1680 x 1050. I had a feeling that this was something to do with the monitor that Vista thinks I had and that was set to ‘Default Monitor’. I had a Samsung driver disk which didn’t want to work (The plot thins. Ed). The monitor is P ‘N’ P but no matter how many times I rebooted it wasn’t discovered. Until……

I performed the biggest reboot I could do, short of switching off the local power station. In fact it wasn’t even a reboot, it was a switch off for 5 minutes. That did the trick. Rebooted Vista, the Samsung monitor sent some data to Vista, which recognised it and the screen resolution is back to 1680 x 1050. Good stuff Virgin.

Quote of the day

‘All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors’ Unknown.